A teacher’s vocation transformed in India
Born at Dungannon in 1867, Noble grew up in a family that moved between Ireland and England. Teaching posts in Keswick, Wrexham and Chester preceded her own Ruskin School in Wimbledon. Educational ideas associated with Pestalozzi and Froebel informed this work. Meeting Vivekananda in London in 1895 drew her towards Vedanta and a new field of activity.
She moved to Calcutta in 1898, received the name Nivedita and opened a school for girls. Plague relief, lectures and writing accompanied education. After Vivekananda’s death in 1902, her increasingly political nationalism took her outside the Ramakrishna Mission’s institutional work. Support for Indian art and collaboration with figures such as Coomaraswamy formed another part of her cultural activity. She died in 1911, leaving projects whose later completion required other hands.
An unfinished collaboration with identifiable contributions
The 1914 Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists names Nivedita and Coomaraswamy together. His preface explains that her death interrupted the work and identifies the portions she supplied, including most of the Mahabharata section and particular introductory and interpretive passages. The completed volume therefore cannot be assigned uniformly to either writer.
Thirty-two colour illustrations by Indian artists were prepared under Abanindranath Tagore’s supervision. The list names makers including Nanda Lal Bose and Asit Kumar Haldar, whose interpretations remain distinct from the prose. Retold episodes give relationships, duty and sacrifice narrative form, while a painter can concentrate on a particular encounter or gesture. The book brings these verbal and visual choices together within an effort to convey the cultural significance of the traditions to English-language readers.
